In my all-time top five, EASY. Since Richler is in the Canadian canon, and I thought it would be great to say "hey yeah I've read him" instead of pretending that I have, I gave this a go. Despite having already seen the film and enjoyed it, my expectations were middling. This novel took said expectations, threw them in the air, and blew them apart with a giant bazooka gun. The great thing about this novel is that although it is obviously, from the get go, a top shelf literary novel, it includes none of the usual flourishes and ploys to convince you if the author's prowess. You get a damn good story, you get heart, you get cutting humour, you get an amazing broad portrait of Quebec at a crucial moment of time, and you get a cross-section of a LIFE that is exquisitely sensitive to the small triumphs and bitter set backs that characterize most of our existences.